


Soldiers and Stone (PruAus Secret Santa)

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Fantasy AU, Human Names Used, M/M, PruAus Secret Santa, and lots of monster descriptions!, fairy tale?, mountains that bleed weird blue light, there's some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 01:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1100594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kingdom huddled in the shadow of a bitter old mountain, all crooked peaks and beasts so hungry they didn’t have room inside to be anything else.  This mountain was a sacred place, a wicked place.  It was a place for gods, and the kingdom beneath it had once been bustling and very much alive.   No longer.  Gilbert was a knight here, but he had been born too late to be a good one.  He mostly just marched about like a merry little toy soldier during the king’s extravagant parades and whiled away his spare time hacking up sparring dummies with one of his swords.  He had far too many swords for a knight who had never seen battle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soldiers and Stone (PruAus Secret Santa)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jacquzy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacquzy/gifts).



> Secret Santa gift for tumblr user f-scott-fitzgerbil, because they requested a fantasy story.
> 
> MERRY CHRISTMAS~! I hope you enjoy this. :D

The kingdom huddled in the shadow of a bitter old mountain, all crooked peaks and beasts so hungry they didn’t have room inside to be anything else. This mountain was a sacred place, a wicked place. It was a place for gods, and the kingdom beneath it had once been bustling and very much alive. No longer. Gilbert was a knight here, but he had been born too late to be a good one. He mostly just marched about like a merry little toy soldier during the king’s extravagant parades and whiled away his spare time hacking up sparring dummies with one of his swords. He had far too many swords for a knight who had never seen battle. 

Gilbert still talked as if he lived in a mighty kingdom, but he knew the truth. The cities had once been studded with fancy museums and concert halls like living, flickering jewels, and now there were shops closing everywhere. People used to practice penmanship and keep all their clothes on in the street – they were orderly and there were workers to scrub vomit and piss up off the sidewalk. 

The king had once perched on an engraved throne, glimpses of battles won and lands conquered far away stretching all around him, liquefied opals melted into the carved rivers so that they hardened like captive rainbows. There had only been the one throne, back then, this mighty Battle Throne. Swords hung crossed above the king’s head, and his knights wore armor threaded with bioluminescent sea monster teeth, to show how they triumphed over the waves, and the feathers of angry, warlike birds because their spellfolk had mastered flight way before those in other kingdoms. Now the king had thirty-seven thrones and spent more time in brothels than in any one of them. 

Gilbert became a knight when he was just a child, really, young enough to still think it meant learning spells to turn your enemies inside out and helping expand what used to be a mighty empire. The fact was, by the time Gilbert was old enough to direct his mad red eyes to the battlefield, old enough to greet his fellow knights with, “Hey, you! Cower before my kickass awesome sword skills,” his kingdom was already beginning to flicker. It was dying. King Francis IV was too busy throwing glitzy parties and trying to stay young and important to care, and the people were too busy attending his monstrous “events” to see. 

It broke Gilbert’s heart to think about it, and that’s how he became friends with Queen Elizabeta. It’s why she trusted him with the news her sorceresses read in the blood spilled at their feet, in the rippling surface of the moon. 

The people were happy now, with silly little carnivals and spellfolk selling charm cards at five coins a pop, but they wouldn’t stay that way. Queen Elizabeta – with her rough hands and hair braided with regular old flowers, not the weird, whispering kind spellfolk liked to sell – pulled Gilbert aside one day while the knights were building a stage for the king’s latest and greatest ball extravaganza. She looked like she was going to be sick. 

“There are armies readying against us,” she said, her voice like glass shattering. “We’re going to be attacked. The land is fertile here, and other people think they’ll be able to use it better. They’re probably right.” 

Gilbert rolled his eyes; he shrugged, though it was possibly the least passive shrug under the stars. He was all jagged angles and lean muscle, kind of short, maybe, but with a very cruel smile. There was dirt under his nails, and he had at least three splinters. “What an easy target,” he said. “Way to go, other kingdoms. Way to be original, picking on the dumbass with their finger up their nose.” 

“You knights are all we’ve got, right now,” Elizabeta told him. 

“We’re a pathetic excuse for an army.” 

“Yes, but you’re not a pathetic excuse for a knight. You probably care about this country more than anyone I know.” 

“That’s probably true,” Gilbert said. “Maybe I should be king.” 

Elizabeta, ever wise, pretended she hadn’t heard him. “I have an idea what we should do, but you aren’t going to like it.” 

Gilbert’s lip curled. “What could possibly be worse than doing nothing? Going to parties and dancing around, waiting to die?” 

“I’m about to ask you to go into the mountain.” 

“Oh, shit.” The mosaics on the palace walls, the paintings in old volumes growing sleepy with mold and dust around the library, everything of any artsy-farsty relevance at all showed the mountain dripping with eerie light, blue as frozen lips. Old spellfolk with pond scum stuck between their toes and wild spaces in their eyes said there was something inside. It was something sacred to the gods, unreachable save to those chosen, those lucky enough to make it past the beasts that had claimed that wicked land. 

Spellfolk said that once upon a time, back before the knights had to hand their gaudy armor over to museum curators, people used to go inside the mountain and come back out with miracles. More likely, of course, they died somewhere or another along the way. Spellfolk said most were swallowed up by the gods, but there were plenty of things out there to eat you, Gilbert figured – no need to get any gods involved. There were spider-wolves with beady wet eyes splattered haphazardly across their faces like flecks of oil, teeth even across the roofs of their mouths and each hair a bristly wire that could rip through human skin with a touch. There were laughing birds with wings that crackled lightning and faces that were all razor beak and endless maw. 

Anyway, the point was nobody had tried going into the mountain for quite a while. In fact, after the last team of explorers were hung in ragged tatters from the palace battlements – the laughing birds playing a joke, no doubt – King Francis had the path to the mountain sealed off with a huge golden statue of a tree, stretching its winding arms in spirals like a fence that was trying way too hard to be something better. The golden tree originally hung with fifty or so crystalline apples, but of course they were stolen very quickly. 

“We need a miracle,” Elizabeta said. “Can you imagine if this kingdom dissolved? Conquered by those people to the north, who wear bones in their hair? Those to the south, who raise drowned men from the darkest seas to fight their battles?” 

“No,” Gilbert said, though at that moment he thought he could imagine it pretty clearly. “That’s impossible.” 

“You’ll go get us a second chance?” 

Gilbert studied the playful curl of Elizabeta’s hair, too merry for her sullen brows. She wore lipstick she didn’t choose herself; her gowns sprouted pearls and ribbons like sores, he thought. It was hard to imagine her young and happy; she said she used to dress like a boy and wreak havoc in her little village. She wasn’t beautiful – he couldn’t have kissed her. He just wanted her to smile and punch him on the shoulder, because he was a darn good friend. 

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever. Count me in, for the kingdom.” 

“Good. I got you a guide already,” Elizabeta suddenly looked somewhat worried; she glanced over her shoulder, though the sky was still swollen blue behind her and all the other knights were still pounding away at that cursed dancing stage. Nothing had changed, but Gilbert could almost convince himself there was a change in the air, a chill, like a breath of cold wafting out from a dank cave. A breath of moss and darkness. The streets rattled on far away, voices just a bit too distant to be heard properly. The city dragged itself through another day, and if there were people fretting over the future, over potential armies gathering beyond the mountain or across the sea, they were too quiet for Gilbert to have faith in them. 

He glanced around, too. It seemed like Elizabeta was trying to find something, someone, amidst the heavy afternoon, the smell of the knights’ collective sweat, the glare of sunlight off the palace’s metal domes and spires. She was twisting one of the pearls off her dress; soon she would drop it and it would get kicked under a bench of lost in the grass. 

“A guide?” Gilbert said. Anything to smother the silence. “But… Why?” 

“He’s a scholar – not one of the spellfolk, don’t worry. I know how you feel about them. A musician. He tells me his mother came back from a trek to the mountain. And his grandfather. He knows the place.” 

“His name?” 

“Roderich... Roderich Something. I guess his last name means ‘precious stone.’ He told me.” Elizabeta stilled, or tried to still. Her eyes were always too restless for what the kingdom had become, now. 

“What a strange conversation starter,” Gilbert said. He was trying to make her smile, but it didn’t work this time. 

“You have no idea. Apparently he can also play the piano in such a way that he can literally move people’s souls.” 

“Deep.” 

There was that smile, now, skulking out of hiding, lingering, uncertain, at the corner of her lips. Apparently she’d been Lizzie, as a child, lovely Lizzie with a bright world before her and a sword arm that would make plenty of knights writhe with jealousy. “Oh, yes,” she said. 

And so that was why Gilbert met this Roderich, Roderich Precious-Stone, this Roderich who somehow knew how to sneak up on the mountain and all its fierce and godly wonders. He intended to meet him in a bar, because that was where he’d feel most at home – they could buy huge tankards of beer with foam on top and a rich, almost overwhelming taste, and they could sit hunched over the counter with their arms not quite touching. They could talk things through like equals, careful not to get their elbows stuck in puddles of drying wine or look too carefully at anybody else. The bar was an equal meeting ground, a free place, impartial. Of course Roderich met him on the way there, met him under a staring moon. 

They couldn’t possibly have made this easy. 

At first Roderich didn’t look like much – he was thin, sort of brittle and delicate. You’d think he had polished bones along with his long, aristocratic nose. He wore gloves and boots up to his knees, with flimsy soles that would tear on any proper rocks, strung with moonstones and pieces of mirror. He was dressed like he was going to attend a fancy party, though part of his hair seemed doomed to stick up perpetually. He looked narrow and breakable under his coat; his lips curled and twitched as he spoke, as though constantly unsatisfied. There was a small mole under his lip; it was the only part of his face that didn’t seem too elegant for an actual trek. His eyes disappeared when his glasses caught the moonlight. 

“The bar’s a little farther down, you know,” Gilbert said. He hoped his sarcasm came through properly. 

“I know. I want to show you my map.” Roderich gestured – an unfamiliar twist of his lip, three fingers lifted toward one of the city’s parks. Gilbert didn’t want to follow. Let it be known that he willed his heels to sprout roots and weave into the road, that he chewed his lip and crossed his arms so tight it hurt. He dug fingernails into the meat near his shoulder, but Roderich strode away as though he were much bigger than he was, as though he were totally at home on the darkened path. None of the lamp-flowers hopped forward to meet him. 

It took a moment, but Gilbert followed his new guide toward a bench with monstrous faces carved along the backrest. Roderich was sitting with his legs crossed at the ankles and a huge, fraying piece of parchment draped over his knees like a blanket. The mountains were painted across it, dominating the whole world, freckled with caverns and paths and tiny settlements labeled with differently shaped eyes – wolf, bird, twin-tailed fox, bat-people, everything. The bat-people’s marks were actually bloody, eager holes, so Gilbert couldn’t have missed them –they were clever enough to almost master human tongues but ritually gouged out their children’s eyes to help them master echolocation. 

Gilbert couldn’t read any of the writing, not a word – his own kingdom was a small collection of lopsided houses, with one domed building that stood a bit apart, swathed in a strange golden glow. It was kind of disconcerting how tiny everything was compared to that behemoth, the waiting mountain that seemed to curve in like a hand, ready to snatch up Gilbert’s kingdom with its sharp peeks like fingers, ready to swat it down and away. Roderich circled the domed building with his own fingertip and smiled. “The city has changed a bit since this was made,” he said. “It’s become a kingdom.” 

“Which path are we going to take into the mountain, then?” 

“We aren’t going to take any of these. They’re heavily patrolled, now. We couldn’t make it.” 

“Patrolled by what? Birds? Bats?” 

“No,” Roderich answered. There was something heavy in his voice that told Gilbert to shut up, look down, breathe soft. Roderich cleared his throat and pressed his lips into a tight line. He handed Gilbert a brush-pen, magically wet with ink, and said, “We’re going to draw a new one. Show me the route you think would be safest. Tell me what you’d plan to do, on your own.” 

Gilbert studied the map. He thought about the way bat-people ate their victims’ eyes. He thought about how mountain paths were said to slither away under people’s feet; the map changed, sometimes, as he watched it, the mountain itself twitching, leaning down closer to the kingdom. Gilbert drew a path that wove around the other ones, that slunk away from the laughing birds’ nests. Children’s stories said laughing birds ate up their victims’ voices, so they were laughing with the tongues of dead men. 

Gilbert scowled and drew another path, this time cutting straight through everything, charging over the carved-out trails and cutting into a den of spider wolves. “I’d blast a hole in the mountain,” he said, daring Roderich to laugh, to contradict him, “I’d open up a new cave, something no one would know to patrol. Shock ‘em. Blow their socks off with my awesome explosives and the fact that my kingdom is worth more than being afraid of them.” 

“The fact?” 

“Of course.” Gilbert met Roderich’s eyes. They were cold and soft and pensive, the eyes of an actual musician, perhaps. “Don’t you think I’d die for this kingdom?” 

“I think you probably will die, and very soon.” 

Gilbert shook his head; he knew it would be like he hadn’t heard. That didn’t matter. The words bounced off him like a bitter, pessimistic rain. He couldn’t expect Roderich to understand, this stranger who spoke in a lilting, strange accent, who refused the warmth of the bar and liked stone benches at nighttime. Roderich wouldn’t get it, but Gilbert spoke anyway, summoning fire into his voice, summoning steel, remembering the way he’d envisioned battle stories when he was still small enough to imagine the famous soldiers with his own face. “This is bigger than me. Our history, what we stand for. I will do anything to preserve this kingdom,” he said. He never questioned it. This wasn’t the first time he’d made that declaration aloud, it was just the first chance he’d had to prove it. 

“Why?” 

“It’s made me what I am. It’s a kickass military force. It’s the best place in the world.” 

“There are candy wrappers under this bench and prostitutes living in the castle.” 

Gilbert answered, without hesitating, without even taking a breath, “It wasn’t always that way. That’s not the way it has to be.” 

“You’re falling apart.” 

Gilbert would have been angry, but Roderich looked almost sad, worried. His brows were furrowed. It was like he was telling Gilbert not to bet on a lame horse, not to pour all his coins into a con man’s pocket. Gilbert smiled at him, a spider-wolf’s leer, and Roderich, shockingly, smiled back. Patronizing. Unconvinced. He smiled like a parent might grin at a child’s conviction that the sky turned white and frosty because it was feeling sad. 

“We’re too awesome to fall,” Gilbert assured him, “That’s what I’m here for.” 

“Gilbert. Gilbert the Knight.” 

“Exactly.” 

Was that grudging respect or annoyance on Roderich’s face? 

“Go home,” the stranger said. He couldn’t see why the kingdom mattered, why its ancient songs could shiver in the bones, why it had stood so long and grown so well. “The team you’re going to command will be waiting at the golden tree. We leave before the sun rises, at your orders, of course.” 

“My orders?” 

“Queen Elizabeta’s.” 

For just an instant, Gilbert imagined these unnamed soldiers toting him home on his shield, his eyes plucked out or spider-wolf venom making his veins dance, squirming under his skin. He didn’t want to think, and so he spoke instead. “So you’re all my servants for the mission? I have an army?” 

“Queen Elizabeta has faith in you.” 

“I order you to come get a beer with me!” 

“I’ll be waiting for you,” Roderich said. He stood, and his form seemed to glint and flicker. He disappeared, and there was a gust of cold like wind at the mouth of a cave, again, a smell like the deepest, least-forgiving pathways, caverns where the cold would happily steal your breath, where the crystals on the wall were sharp enough to slice your throat. 

“Elizabeta said you weren’t one of the spellfolk,” Gilbert groaned. “Goddammit, Lizzie. And he’s so smug, too.” 

… 

There were many soldiers gathered on this quest together, and each and every one of them thought Gilbert’s plan stunk worse than the tar pits. It was a fool’s errand, they said, though they had hacked a few spider-wolves to piles of squirming legs and twitching guts. They might as well just drive their swords into their hearts now and be done with it, they said, though Roderich had helped them riddle their way out of a chance encounter with a sad, lonely laughing bird who spoke with the voice of a poet. They despaired of their quest, though of course they had made it quite a ways into the mountains. The path wandered under their feet, yes, and a handful of their number had been carried off stealthily in the night, a few others left bloody and broken when they fled the battlefield. 

Bearing in mind few of these soldiers had ever participated in anything gorier than a bar fight or a training exercise, they were doing well. Gilbert assured them they were on a roll, they were making it happen, they were doing their goddamned best and that’s all that could possibly have been asked of them. At first, everyone cheered when they spoke, but soon enough it was only Roderich, nodding softly at his side, meeting his eyes with a curious, almost frustrated, almost proud expression on. 

Later, Gilbert would say they could have been marching for weeks, for months. They fed off the misshapen horrors that skulked among the rocks, that drank from cruel streams in those ancient forests. They lived, some of the men said, like animals. It didn’t feel so long or so bad to Gilbert, though perhaps that was just his fervor, his hope. Roderich sometimes urged him to rest; he cleaned Gilbert’s wounds with freezing water even if he had been ordered to march on, keep silent, and even if he ended up getting cussed out for it. Roderich turned out to be very bad at keeping silent. He would often say, “If I don’t make you listen, you’ll march on until your feet fall off. These men need food,” “These men need sleep,” “Your leg is infected and I’ll get your smelliest soldier to carry you if you don’t let me tend to it.” 

“Why are you doing this?” Gilbert once asked, through gritted teeth. 

“Because I think your nation is full of hedonistic, insensitive fools. They’ll never make it inside the mountain this way.” 

“They will. You’ll see.” 

“I think you’re a little different. I don’t know why. Maybe you’re just stupider.” 

“That’s probably it.” 

Roderich and Gilbert sometimes sat together by firelight, while the other soldiers drank themselves into a stupor and fought over the scraps of jewelry they’d found along their path. Gilbert told about his dreams as a child, what knighthood was supposed to mean. Roderich told him that the spider-wolves were afraid of humanity, that they had stories where mankind eventually wipes them out written in all their sacred books. Gilbert told of how his uncle Freddy had lifted him up high above the crowds to see every parade, how they’d sparred together in the backyard. Roderich told Gilbert that he’d come from far away, and that if Gilbert weren’t there he might have thought the kingdom worthless. 

“I guess that’s fair,” Gilbert said. “I showed you how great it is. Now just shut up about the kingdom. It’s probably twice as good as wherever you come from.” 

Sometimes, when Gilbert was on watch, Roderich would sit up with him long into the night. They’d talk in whispers most of the time, leaning in close, discussing potential attack methods, journey plans and the like, so close Gilbert was sure Roderich would be able to smell how wandering had soured his breath. Roderich never smelled like anything at all, except maybe the cold. He was the first one Gilbert called to in battle; he could only sleep peacefully during Roderich’s watch, he found. They could meet eyes across the crowd of soldiers, and Roderich would know exactly what strategy Gilbert was mentally screaming about, trying to relay. At first it was an unsteady, frustrated alliance. Then it was friendship. Then, one night when it was especially chilly, Roderich sang a folksong from Gilbert’s kingdom back when it was proud and grand. 

Gilbert wept; not the sniffy, awkward kind of crying you might have expected but something very solemn, almost sadder because it was only a few tears and a hollow feeling between his ribs. He told Roderich his soul did stir, roughly two inches to the left. He said it sarcastically, sneering, but it was kind of the truth. It was just that the song made home seem so far away, so fragile, something to be bundled to the chest and protected like a small bird. Roderich pulled Gilbert to his own chest as though he knew that feeling, as though he knew it exactly. He just kept singing, soft and clear, until the song became a murmur in Gilbert’s ear alone. 

“You’re going to be alright. If I have anything to say about it, you’re going to be alright,” Roderich said. He was such a spindly soldier. Not much to look at, still, despite all he’d done. It could have felt like this was just an empty promise, just big words tossed out into the night for their own sake. Gilbert believed him. He would have guessed that neither of them remembered falling asleep. 

That morning, Roderich had disappeared, and the soldiers came to Gilbert with whole handfuls of new complaints. They were going to miss the king’s grand gala, they said, and there would be literal lakes of punch and crystallized fruit so sweet and sharp its taste could linger on your tongue for days, dying your mouth better than human. They were going to miss the king’s gala because it was tonight, and this stupid quest was taking such a stupid long time. 

Gilbert said the king would throw another gala someday, and one of his knights told him no, no he wouldn’t, not if the kingdom fell. 

Gilbert just stared as the soldiers nodded, saying it might be better to enjoy the world of light and wine and dancing before it was lying at their feet. 

“We’re going to get the explosives together now and blow that hole in the mountain,” Gilbert said, “Who wants to help me?” 

“Go get the stuff,” one of the soldiers said, “We’ll meet you up by the mountain.” 

“The kingdom is counting on us,” Gilbert said. 

“Oh, yes, the kingdom,” said the knights. “Oh, we won’t let that dear old kingdom down.” 

But they did, each and every one of them. Gilbert strung glass orbs filled with wicked, corrosive potions up like lamps; he lit the fuse and felt the mountain moan and shudder as he opened a wound on its back. No one came to help him. He waited. He called. He thrashed one of his swords into the mountain’s side until it was broken. His soldiers waited, or mocked him, or went in a gibbering horde down the mountainside hoping for a gala. Perhaps they made it to the party and danced their lives away. Perhaps they were caught up in twisted old bat-people fingers and heard their own names whispered back wrong and misshapen into their ears before they lost their eyes. 

In the end, it didn’t matter. Gilbert blasted that hole in the mountain himself, and when he stepped inside his ankles were shaking. He walked quite a while before he knew the darkness was watching him. Liquid shadow-forms slithered across the walls, darker than dark, chittering just a little, voices like the crackle of footprints on stone. They stretched themselves out as long as the cave wall and pooled inside Gilbert’s pores, tangled themselves in his hair. His lamp swung, the wax dripping down to sting and harden on his hand. He walked on, eyes narrowed, the things in the darkness brushing his lips so he tasted ash. The world pressed around him, ever narrower, so that the walls scraped his shoulders and the ceiling leaned down on his back for support. 

He was hungry. His legs felt like they might snap apart if he walked even a single step farther. Gilbert kept on as long as he could, teeth clinched, lamp casting fearful shadows behind him. Soon, he could hear the dark, eager voices for what they were – 

“Drink him,” they were saying, “He smells like one of them, like the ones born of light.” 

“He’s not alone.” 

“Kill him now.” 

“His heart’s beating so fast!” 

One of the shadows reached its long arm down Gilbert’s throat, seeping itself through his lips, between his teeth. He couldn’t breathe. The last thing he saw before he passed out was Roderich, but not Roderich, not Roderich at all. This Roderich was like diamond, translucent and sharp as a sliver of lightning. He was liquid crystal. It occurred to Gilbert, for just a single second, that he was the melted opal decorating the Battle Throne. It was his blood, maybe, this precious, living stone. 

He came from farther into the cave, face impassive, like a mask of hardened crystal bringing order out of such cold radiance. Perhaps he came to attack. Perhaps he meant to defend. Gilbert didn’t know until he woke, and he woke in the strangest place he had ever seen. 

He was still in the cave – he must have been, though the room didn’t have a ceiling, or space in the sense he understood – everything above was haunted blue light, shivering with tiny crystals, wet like tears. He was lying wrapped in the roots of a tree, perhaps, because curving roads like vines eased into the blue-soaked spaces around him. Occasionally they rattled, gems on gems, silver leaves whispering like they were awake, like they knew Gilbert was listening. Crystal fruit lay soft and glinting on the ground; there an apple with a ruby heart, bleeding light, there an orange with each bead of juice wet and golden. What kind of strange plants could grow here, nurtured by this cursed, godly sun? 

It was cold, so cold Gilbert could see his breath pool around his head. Perhaps he was lying on pieces of parchment; perhaps he was wrapped in Roderich’s ancient map, the one he’d scribbled on in the darkness. 

Gilbert sat up and peered around him. There were carvings on the ground, words in a language he had never imagined. The carvings moved, tangible and living, same as the blue light, same as the restless trees. 

“Roderich?” Gilbert asked. He wasn’t expecting anything in particular. He would have had no idea what to expect. 

“Here,” said Roderich. His hand was cool on Gilbert’s arm; he eased him down onto the paper bed. “You’re incredibly rash, you know that? Foolhardy and rash. I take back all the kind things I once said about you.” 

“This is where the gods in the mountain live,” Gilbert said. He studied Roderich; his edges were blurred, somewhat, like the light from within him was straining to join the cold blue light that was everything else. He was part of that brilliance, part of the deadly curse, the charm of the mountain. Gilbert blinked. He remembered times he and Roderich had let their knees bump together at the fireside. He remembered the way he had sometimes offered this fragile little twig of a man a hand up on the cliff-face. He remembered the sad, thoughtful smile Roderich wore as he accepted a boost he probably didn’t need. “The fairytales were true.” 

“There are _people_ in the mountain,” Roderich corrected. “Not gods. Frightened outsiders made us gods.” 

“But this is where the gods live.” 

A flicker of annoyance passed across Roderich’s face, but in the end he said, “Yes.” 

“The gods are made of precious stones. You’re Roderich Precious-Stone – you’re –” 

“I was here when the last humans made it through into our halls. I did not guess it would happen again. In fact, it was my sworn duty to make sure it would not. I was supposed to lead you all in merry circles until you died. I’ve done it before.” 

Gilbert looked for Roderich’s eyes, and found them hidden behind glass, vanished save for the icy sheen, the same way his glasses had masked them the first time they met. His lips twitched, still, and despite all the changes he still had the same impudent, lofty expressions, the same long nose. Gilbert could still imagine him laughing the way he’d heard him laugh, eating the soldiers’ hasty stew with a quizzical expression, as though it were some kind of delicacy. 

Gilbert felt he knew Roderich. He imagined him dragging him back here to this strange grove for safekeeping, or, against all odds, hefting Gilbert over his shoulder like a sack of flour, tsking to himself about fools and quests. The thousands of years Roderich might have lived before they traveled together didn’t matter nearly as much as Gilbert would have expected them to. He could only say, “Will you grant my wish? Can you save my kingdom?” 

_“Your_ kingdom?” Roderich chuckled. He could be a real jerk sometimes, but his skin was alight and his eyes reflected back Gilbert’s nervous smile. Gilbert found himself wondering what it would be like to touch skin like that. Later on, though not quite yet, he would imagine what it would be like to kiss that skin, and by then it would be too late for him. But you will see. 

“Can you save me?” Gilbert asked. He knew the question would mean more than anything that had come before, though he didn’t know how he was so sure. Roderich’s brows arched; the fluid tendrils of his hair shifted, flashes of light with one strand still sticking up in that strange way. Gilbert imagined him beating up the darkness, those twitching, vicious creatures of shadow and damp. Did he fight with a sword? What kind of badass could this guy possibly be? But of course he’d outwitted the laughing birds; of course he’d known how to pass invisible to the bat-people. He was more than he’d seemed. Gilbert had once cracked a geode open as a child, seen the frosty crystals clustered secret inside the rough stone. The mountain was like that; Roderich was like that. 

But Roderich was frowning. “Is that what you want more than anything else in the world? More than freedom? More than purpose? More than –” and here Roderich’s hand drifted down to Gilbert’s chest, such a chilly light over his heart. Perhaps it was tenderness. Perhaps it was a threat. 

Gilbert wanted to ask him to continue. Did he mean, “More than me?” or did he mean, “More than your messy human life?” 

“Please,” Gilbert said. In the end, it was all he could say. 

“You’re interesting. Poor boy. Poor, lost knight, trying to defend such a place. Stay here with me three days, and I will come back with you to your kingdom. I will bring an army.” 

Gilbert believed him, as well he should have, though he stayed far more than three days. It is hard to feel time pass inside the mountain, for just like in all fairylands the world is sort of suspended, sort of a stagnant, unreal place. Inside a cave, inside the glowing gut of a mountain, especially that foul mountain, it was as if the sun never set. It was another world, where cities wove between stalactites so long and wild they nearly brushed the ground though the ceiling was out of sight; there were communities built into stalagmites, dark lakes full of sightless creatures that knew all your secrets. 

There were stands selling anything you could wish for. Gilbert almost traded his battered sword for a vial of courage, but Roderich grabbed his arm and said it would make him a monster. They ate unthinkable foods, drank water that tasted like starlight looked, drank wine that made you talk backwards and forget your name. Most of the creatures Gilbert met under the mountain had never seen starlight. Some had many arms and obsidian skin, forged in fires deep beneath the earth. Some wore bejeweled masks over faces of mud, studded with grit, worms slithering about inside them like veins. Some, like Roderich, were “born of light.” That didn’t matter so much, after a while. It was a metropolis, full of flawed individuals that cackled and groaned and dreamed. 

Full of gods. 

There were moments Gilbert would remember, though of course he had no idea how much time was passing. One time, Roderich slipped on his human skin again so Gilbert might feel comfortable holding his arm. 

“It’s so you don’t get lost in the crowd,” Roderich said, though that wasn’t it. 

Gilbert nudged him in the ribs and told him to change back, because he was a little better looking than the average nightlight. Roderich laughed. It seemed they’d both been lonelier than they’d thought, lonely for a very long time. 

Gilbert asked, at some point, “So those shadow people that attacked me – I still hear them sometimes. Am I imagining that?” 

“Oh, no,” Roderich said. “They’re everywhere. They’re what happened when we coaxed life out of the cave’s own darkness. We… Tend to overstep our bounds. We help too much, as a people.” 

“You brought them to life, and now they’re evil?” 

“We brought them to life, and now they’re doing what darkness in caves is meant to do. They’re spreading. We have knights now, too, just like your people -- we never used to need them, but now they’re all that’s keeping this little city together.” 

“If I stayed here, I could be a knight.” 

“Fighting the darkness?” 

Gilbert was almost offended by the disbelief in his voice. “If someone taught me how, yes.” 

The conversation almost became offensive then. “That’s actually why we had to start sending ‘guides’ to mislead you humans, when you came up here to the mountain,” Roderich said. “You took our gifts and tried to take over the continent. Who taught you to master the sea, the sky? Who do you think?” 

“We’re taught we did that on our own. Our kingdom,” Gilbert said. He almost couldn’t say it. 

“I know,” Roderich said, “But where else would you have gotten crystal fruit, away from our halls?” 

They argued that day, Roderich flaming like a little pissy star, Gilbert biting a hole right through his own lip accidentally, snarling with bloody teeth. That night they kissed for the first time, and the second. 

“It’s a beautiful kingdom,” Roderich said, “But only because you love it so much.” 

“Is that opal stuff in the Battle Throne your blood?” Gilbert asked. “Did we get that from you, too?” 

“What?” 

“Oh, forget I said anything.” 

After what felt like just a little while, Roderich showed Gilbert a troop of soldiers carved from the boulders outside the mountain, wearing armor hanging with bioluminescent sea monster teeth, with the feathers of angry, warlike birds. Traditional armor from Gilbert’s museums, sprung to life again and waiting. 

“We can go now, to your kingdom, if you like,” Roderich would say. “Or we could wait a little longer to say goodbye.” 

Gilbert said he would wait a little longer four times, and that was his mistake. Finally when he said it was time, said they must surge forward furious and free, bringing the kingdom that coveted miracle, Roderich gave him his own set of traditional armor. It felt like a second, better skin. 

They left the mountain, but the world outside had changed. There was a strange new road passing by the cliffside, polished and smooth, somehow, not the kind of road with footprints crossing it or the ponderous indents left by wagon wheels. It was like hardened tar, grey-black pitch with yellow paint scrawled across it in symbols Gilbert couldn’t understand. Metal beasts rattled along it, glass faces catching the sunlight, people sitting inside, maybe. In the distance, skyscrapers clawed at the clouds, all bright and stern and new. There were a hundred thousand smells Gilbert couldn’t know, like asphalt and smog and the soda someone had spilled on one of the mountain’s rocks after an impromptu picnic. There were a hundred thousand things he saw he couldn’t place – a billboard advertising sunglasses was set along the road, among the jagged peaks. 

Perhaps the mountain had once been a hand, fingers ready to clench down on his kingdom. Now, though, humanity had built up a second hand, of metal and mirror and neon, lined with screens and choking on tobacco smoke. 

“How did they fall?” Gilbert asked. “Who defeated them?” 

Roderich looked frightened. “I doubt they remember,” he said. 

“We were too late. Who are they, now? Could I speak their language?” 

Later, Gilbert would try to imagine himself through Roderich’s eyes, imagine himself stumbling along sidewalks cluttered with old pizza boxes and empty lipstick containers, babbling his head off about knights and flags and the Battle Throne that had been stolen or destroyed in one of the wars he never managed to see. It was a bustling city; some people might pity him, press a coin into his palm. Some might kick his gut and tell him to get a job. Spellcards were now up to five hundred coins at least, or one snazzy bill made of plastic meant to imitate bark. Schools had a new name for Gilbert’s king, poor old Francis the Blind. 

It was better, in the end. 

It was better that Roderich silently snatched up Gilbert’s hand and squeezed his palm, led him back into the cave, to its crystal groves and shadows. It was better that he led him away, because every land must grow or fade. That kingdom died, as most kingdoms must; it was a memory, like a precious little stone to keep in your pocket, like a baby bird dead before it could learn to fly.


End file.
